


Worth(less)

by khooliha



Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Gen, POV Second Person, sibling stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 12:03:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6374008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/khooliha/pseuds/khooliha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Knives can do funny things to a mind. Guilt can do more.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Worth(less)

In your life you are given in finite number of opportunities to fuck up. Eventually you’ll run out and die, or ruin everything so badly that your choices are taken from you. Add a younger sibling to that? Suddenly your opportunities drain away, suddenly you’re five years old in a house of bruises and blood and you’re tending to his wounds, shielding him as best you can from a position of no power. Suddenly his breath is your breath and his heartbeat is your heartbeat. Suddenly you’re living on the edge of a razor and you’re always looking for an exit, any exit. 

Then you find it. It tastes like gasoline and burning hair and you don’t think you’ll ever get that flavor out of your mouth, but you take it. Ten out of ten times you’d take it. A hundred out of a hundred. All out of all. 

You ride this wave as best you can, try and keep the two of you above water, and eventually when he takes over, takes charge, you let him. You’re busy enough always looking for a way out. You get to be the best at it and you two get to be the best together because you have no one else, not really, and you grow together like trees sprouted too tight. 

You are the exit finder, the balancing force. You nearly laugh every night, with that first exit’s taste on your tongue, because he doesn’t know, can’t know, because if he saw your grub-pale guts and hated you? If he left you, in disgust or otherwise? Then you couldn’t keep him safe and that’s why you keep going, if you’re honest with yourself. He knows you can find exits even if he doesn’t know why and that’s one of the reasons you love him as fiercely as you do. 

In an effort to avoid fucking up (long after you should impact his life, long long after people should be able to speak your names separately but don’t, can’t) you refuse to help him with a job and it turns out you still had one fuck up lurking in the account because he is arrested, taken, couldn’t find his own exit. His being in jail feels like half your bones being broken and you can keep moving, keep living, but it hurts so bad and you feel so cold all the time. 

You try to be a person without him and other people seem to buy it even as you feel like a fraud, know that you are not what they see. 

You win a knife in a throwing contest on of these nights. 

So when you start to crack in new, interesting ways you wonder if this is just what grief is. You’ve never grieved for anything other than this. Your efforts to be human fall to the wayside as you simply fight to be yourself. The years stretch on forever. Does this count as a fuck up? You don’t know, but you are fairly sure that it’s you specifically that is the source, that everything is ruined by your presence. Snakes slither through underbrush and someone calls your name and you can’t always tell which is which, which seems bad. You even poison the forest. 

The only thing that pulls you out is his call, his plan. He needs an exit again and briefly whatever is happening to you falls away and you are fully yourself. It doesn’t last. 

You fought it for nearly three years, every muscle straining in opposition, but you crumple finally, _finally_ , because it, whatever it is, shows you his body, twisted and lifeless, a leap off the cheap motel roof with no fucking exit. You feel like this thing trying to destroy you understands you, finally understands you, and giving in is almost a relief. What’s the life of a fuck up worth? 

You are not destroyed. 

You are different, muffled or swaddled, but he is still not safe and the taste is still in your mouth. It’s enough, so you swim through the soup of yourself. For a while it feels almost good and you have felt bad for so long. It doesn’t fix anything, it doesn’t last – after all, you’re still involved. 

Hot dust, hot neon, and the voice in your head is deafening now. You’ve found where it lives and for an instant nothing has ever been so satisfying – it’s real, you can point to it, anyone can see it. Her. Then she bares her teeth and something that isn’t you finally breaks. 

When you are freed, actually freed in your own head, how long does it last? It’s not perfect, not pure – you think he hates you, can see why he would, but you push it away because you need your heartbeat. You need your half-mended bones. 

The world tries to kill you and you are pretty sure that you deserve it. 

And when the thing that tried to unmake you, the woman who so badly needs an exit, when she offers you not dying, you have to think a moment. When you remember that you can’t keep him safe dead you take it. What _is_ a fuck up’s life worth? His life at least. You take it. 

When his fear comes to kill him, wearing your face, you kill it. It breaks your heart as you break its neck. 

And, in spite of everything, you’re still the best at exits, even when they’re ancient and mythical and not meant to be breached. You don’t care about any of that – exits are exits, jobs are jobs, and you two are good, even as frayed as you are. 

You get out and you even give her the exit she needed too. If you couldn’t See you would feel good about it. But you felt the hot rush of his life across your tongue and you _can_ See, can see what being near you might do to him, the future alternating between foggy and fang sharp in your view. Safety is away from you and it hurts to look at him. He knows about the first exit now and he doesn’t hate you, doesn’t reject you, but you have to send him away. It’s for the best, assuming the best tastes like bile and burns twice as hot. He could betray you, hate you, kill you if he has to – you will keep him safe.

Before he goes you slip the knife, the fucking knife, sticky with your own blood, into his pocket. Severing all ties is probably the better plan, but you’re selfish and the exit man. He’s always taken care of the plans. Maybe what few fuck ups you had earned some interest and you were cashing out. Maybe you weren’t meant to let him go. But you do and he goes and you’re truly undead now, whether you’re supposed to be or not. The blood in your veins just walked out the door. 

And all you can do is hope that it is worth it, all of it. And if it isn’t? You have a very long time to find the exit. 


End file.
